MoneyWeb has the story of Relative Value Arbitrage Fund (RVAF), an alleged massive Ponzi scheme in South Africa in which Herman Pretorius shot and killed a business partner in July and then shot and killed himself.

The scheme appears to have gathered R2.2bn, the equivalent of more than $250 million (U.S.).

From Julius Cobbett at MoneyWeb (italics/bolding added):

RVAF curators estimate that the scheme received R2.2bn from about 3000 investors. At the time of Pretorius’s death, the RVAF owed an estimated R3.1bn to investors.

The difference between the amount received and owing is most likely explained by the fund’s performance, which is believed to be fictitious.

Investigations following Pretorius’s death show that he alone was in control of a tangled web of companies, close corporations, trusts and offshore bank accounts.

NOTE BY PP BLOG: Some scammers on Ponzi-scheme forums also purport to engage in “arbitrage.” The collapse of purported arbitrage “program” Gold Nugget Invest (GNI) in 2010 brought out the “conspiracy theorists,” the PP Blog reported at the time.

Among the bizarre assertions was that the SEC was under investigation by INTERPOL.

It is common for Ponzi-board scammers to use terms that sound impressive — arbitrage, for instance — in their scams.

“Ken Russo,” a former Ponzi-board pitchman for the alleged Zeek Rewards Ponzi scheme, was promoting something called “NewGNI” even as he was promoting Zeek, according to his posts at the TalkGold Ponzi forum (as “DRdave”).

NewGNI may be a follow-up scam to the GNI scam.

Read a January 2010 PP Blog story on some of the bizarre claims surrounding the collapse of GNI, a scheme also pushed by some members of the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme.